When you think of Twitter and influence, you might think that the most obvious metric used to measure would be the number of followers a user has. Time and again, influence on Twitter has been shown to be not a direct function of how many followers one has, but a number of other factors.
One of those factors, according to a report by HP, may be just as obvious as follower numbers: long-standing status as a source of information and news. Having millions upon millions of followers may be fun, but it doesn't set the Trending Topics.
Worldwide mobile data traffic is due to increase 26-fold to 75 exabytes annually, says networking giant Cisco in its latest report, the Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2010 to 2015. To put that in perspective, that's the equivalent of 19 billion DVDs, 536 quadrillion SMS text messages or 75 times the amount of global Internet IP data (fixed and mobile data) in the year 2000.
It's also a major increase from Cisco's report last year, which forecasted an increase to 40 exabytes by 2014.
When Apple's new desktop-focused Mac App Store launched, it was expected to be a hit. One day later, Apple confirmed that the store was taking off, with over 1 million downloads on its first day. But how many of those were free apps? How many were copies of Twitter for Mac or Angry Birds? What about individual developers' results?
As it turns out, many Mac App Store developers are sharing details about their Mac App Store sales figures, both on their own websites and in traditional forums. Below is a selection of those results. Spoiler alert: the news is good.
The first in-depth user research study on the usage of the "Location" field within Twitter profiles has just been published by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). With a sample size of 32 million English language tweets in hand, PARC summer intern Brent Hecht selected a group of 10,000 active users to study. Remarkably, he found that 34% of Twitter users do not provide a valid geographic location on their Twitter user profiles. Instead, some of these users co-opt the field to make jokes, express their love for a particular celebrity or to shout back at Twitter that their location is "NON YA BUSINESS!" Others, meanwhile, provide no location information at all.
For any related service or other research study that leverages this field to determine Twitter users' actual location, the implication is obvious. Without first parsing the tweets to remove those that don't use the location field as intended, the sample data could be corrupted. PARC already found one study where that was the case.
As the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2011) kicks into high gear this week in Las Vegas, we're again seeing a number of 3D-enabled products from TVs to tablets to mobile devices. It's the second (or is it third?) coming of 3D, it seems, and this time around it's often glasses-free.
Much of the development around the technology is concerned with bringing 3D to your living room, such as is the case with the 3D-enabled TVs from LG and Toshiba, for example, Samsung's 3D LED monitors, or the addition of 3D movies to the streaming service VUDU, which can pipe Hollywood entertainment directly into your living room. But 3D is showing up on other screens, too - mobile phones and tablets, gaming devices and mobile 3D DTV devices - although still in early forms.
But before you go all in, early-adopting this new craze, there's a little tidbit of not-inconsequential data you need to know first.
Apple is still the U.S. market share leader when in comes to smartphone operating systems, according to new data revealed today by Nielsen, but just barely. In fact, its lead is so tenuous, that the margin of error on Nielsen's report places second-place platform RIM BlackBerry in a statistical tie for both Apple's top spot and the third place spot now occupied by Google's Android.
Says Nielsen, "this race might still be too close to call."
Mobile technology has seen major advances over the course of 2010, with new platforms, new services and new usage trends all taking hold to spread the adoption of not just the mobile Web, but the Web itself. The number of smartphone owners are increasing, mobile operating systems are proliferating and apps have become the new go-to tools for accessing mobile content on the go.
When you look back at the past 12 months, it's almost hard to narrow a list down to only 10 top products, in fact - there's so much innovation happening around mobile today. But we think the list below stands out as representative of the most important products from the year.
Opera Software has released its State of the Mobile Web report for November 2010 today, but has also taken the opportunity to look back at the preceding months to summarize trends and statistics related to global mobile Web usage for 2010. The findings? Mobile Web surfing is way, way up.
Opera served 340 billion pages during the first 11 months of the year compared with only 129 billion pages during the same period in 2009. There are now 80 million users on the mobile Web using Opera's Mini browser - a 91.8% increase from last year. And Facebook and Google are still top Web destinations, but the two have swapped the number 1 and 2 slots as 2010 draws to a close.
The wake of the Delicious debacle has been very fruitful for a few other services that occupy a similar Web curation space. One that popped up in the comments in our original post on Delicious was Trunk.ly, which sounded promising for not only offering to collect the links users share on social networks, but to make them searchable. Saving a bunch of links on "library school" is one thing, but being able to parse them out and subdivide them by search, that is where the beauty of data curation lies.
